Franchise History
The NBDL initially announced that Roanoke was under consideration for one of the inaugural teams in August 2000. Competing with Hampton for Virginia's NBDL team, Roanoke was evaluated as a potential franchise location based on its population, arena size and lack of a major NCAA basketball program in the Roanoke Valley. After reaching an agreement to play home games at the Roanoke Civic Center, the NBDL announced Roanoke as the league's fifth member on May 18, 2001. The announcement marked the return of professional basketball to Roanoke since the departure of the American Basketball Association's Virginia Squires following the 1972-73 season.
By June 2001, Donna Daniels was named team president and Kent Davidson was announced as the first head coach in franchise history. On July 18, 2001, Daniels announced the team nickname, the Dazzle. The name was chosen purposefully to not reflect Roanoke's railroad heritage as two other professional teams, the Roanoke Express and the Roanoke Steam, already called the civic center home. The Dazzle would be victorious in the inaugural game on November 18, 2001, against the Mobile Revelers in the Roanoke Civic Center.
After five seasons, and overall moderate success on the court, the Dazzle were one of the final two teams from the NBDL inaugural season to last through the 2005-06 season. The Fayetteville Patriots were the other. Both were owned by the NBA for their entire five season history. On May 1, 2006, the NBA Development League announced that the NBA would no longer operate the Roanoke Dazzle. League President Phil Evans briefly held out the possibility of a local ownership group operating the team. However when a local ownership group failed to materialize, the team was disbanded..
Read more about this topic: Roanoke Dazzle
Famous quotes containing the words franchise and/or history:
“...feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but rather intellectual biologists and psychologists.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)